Yale Daily News Magazine | December 2021 by Yale Daily News

DONATIONS AND THE

CURRICULUM

THE STRUGGLE TO DEFINE ACADEMIC FREEDOM BY YASMINE CHOKRANE

DAILY NEWS

MAGAZINE VOL. CXLIV ISSUE 1 DECEMBER 2021

EDITORS’ NOTE Hi Mag Fam!

Magazine Editors in Chief Claire Lee Marie Sanford Managing Editors Galia Newberger Associate Editors Isa Dominguez Sarah Feng Oliver Guinan Charlotte Hughes Samhitha Josyula Sean Pergola Abigail Sylvor Greenberg Magazine Design Editors Jose Estrada Rachel Folmar Naz Onder Stephanie Shao Isaac Yu Photography Editors Zoe Berg Karen Lin Regina Sung Vaibhav Sharma Illustration Editors Cecilia Lee Sophie Henry Copy Editors Josie Jahng Hailey O’Connor Chris Lee Yingying Zhao Caroline Parker Editor in Chief & President Rose Horowitch

That’s the salutation we have used to begin all our emails to our panlist this academic year. Our staff writers are SWAGs — staff writers of Mag — and the associate and managing editors that make up our managing board are MEBs — Mag Editorial Board, pronounced “meebs.” And we are Claire and Marie aka Marie Claire. Thank you so much for taking the time to read our first issue as Editors-in-Chief of the Yale Daily News Magazine. This academic year is a special one. Sept. 1 marked the return of in-person classes after a year of online instruction due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. With the guidance of health experts, students were able to safely socialize and student groups made a comeback with live performances and activities. For the first time in over a year, we saw a return to “normalcy,” as much as we can conceptualize it, on Yale campus. This issue serves in part to commemorate this special moment for students at Yale. Madelyn Dawson explores the revival of campus’s live music scene in her Insight “Return to Live Music.” Integrating music and interview footage, Oliver Guinan’s audio essay captures the momentous return of the Yale Symphony Orchestra’s Halloween show. Sarah Feng explores in her personal essay “Hues and Shades” what holding onto childhood means for her as she worked as an instructor at an art camp during her gap year before matriculating to Yale. Thank you to the students, many of whom were first years, that piled into the YDN board room during our first pitch meeting and excitedly bounced ideas off each other. Thank you to our amazing editorial board, staff writers and contributors for all of their time and effort during this editorial cycle. Thank you to the Copy, Photo and Illustrations desks for being incredibly speedy and flexible when returning edits or art. Thank you to P&D for laying out this beautiful magazine. And thank you to the readers of Mag; we hope this issue leaves you feeling inspired. Over the course of this year, we hope to integrate more mixed multimedia, more cultural criticism, more poetry, more anything really, as we explore what it even means to be YDN Mag. For now, though, we are excited for winter recess and keeping cozy while we are away from 202 York St. We hope you do the same. Best, Claire and Marie AKA Marie Claire :)

Publisher Christian Martinez Cover Photo by Yale Daily News

4 insight Return to Live Music MADELYN DAWSON 8 poem atlanticism MIRANDA WOLLEN 9 personal essay Hues and Shades SARAH FENG

AS SEEN ON TV: The Reality of Teen Drama Television Culture by Idone Rhodes

2 | December 2021

TABLE OF CONTENTS

EIGHTEEN

Fiction by Audrey Kolker

THE YSO HALLOWEEN SHOW Audio Essay by Oliver Guinan

15 feature Donations and the Curriculum YASMINE CHOKRANE 20 mixed multimedia Walking Around ISA DOMINGUEZ

26 painting Utopia CATHERINE KWON 27 proﬁle Basil JOHN NGUYEN

GRAFFITI IN THE STACKS Poem by Suraj Singareddy

Yale Daily News | 3

INSIGHT

Return to Live Music at Yale How Yale Students are Reviving Live Music as In-Person Activities Resume BY MADELYN DAWSON

n the midst of the noise, between the second set and the headliner, Sonnet Carter ’23, the manager of WYBC — otherwise known as Yale Radio-Station — had new radio trainees pledge their allegiance to music and to radio. They would scream “Radio is dead,” to which we responded “Long live radio.” I was towards the back, surrounded by friends I had made only a month ago, as we all raised our ﬁsts to the dingy basement ceiling at the exact same instant. Some of Carter’s words were difﬁcult to make out over the chorus of voices that surrounded her, but that did nothing to hinder the spirit –– any words

we could not make out were replaced with unintelligible yelling. This moment was entangled with a sort of cultish melodrama: We embraced every word and proclaimed our allegiance to this newfound family as if it were our dying wish. For one of the ﬁrst times at Yale, I found myself in a space where I could tell I belonged –– where I could tell everyone belonged. That was the ﬁrst time in almost two years where I felt that sort of energy. As much as it affected live displays of music worldwide, COVID-19 put an abrupt end to live music performances at Yale. Performers, organizers and attendees alike adapted their

relationship to music and to the public. Live events were quickly replaced by virtual ones and the communal energy of a concert venue was extinguished. It was during the pandemic I realized how much I relied on live music shows, and how much I felt the void of their absence. It is easier to share a space with people when you can see them and to connect with an artist when you can see every glint of passion in their eyes and every gesture they make to underscore their sound. This intimacy, this level of personal connection with an artist and fellow listeners, was what was missing during virtual shows and music with-

// CHARLIE GLEBERMAN

4 | DECEMBER 2021

out visuals — a “sharing of space” in its most literal sense. WYBC as a home of music and performance WYBC is a celebration of music in all forms. They host bustling live basement shows, train sound engineers at their in-house live recording studio and boast a schedule of almost 100 different broadcasted shows. Prior to the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, 216 Dwight St. –– given the apt shorthand of “two-sixteen” –– was a hub for live music, and with it, passion, connection and emotion. It was both an off-campus house for WYBC executives and a frequent concert venue. “I think honestly I’m just super excited to see everyone in the space again,” said Emily Xu ’24, WYBC extended board member and zine department head on the ﬁrst 216 show. “It just

touches my heart to see all of these people who are willing to come out of their way to an off campus house and see bands and artists perform.” Excitement for a true in-person show had been built up during the pandemic and nowhere was that more clear than at the Oct. 29 WYBC Halloween show — the ﬁrst live show at 216 in almost two years. This performance featured three high intensity sets: from Nutritional Yeast, a Yale student metal band, Captiøn, an alternative hip hop artist based out of Atlanta and Jade Tourniquet, a self described “haze gaze punk rock” group. Two-sixteen was ﬁlled that night, both with people and with energy. Each act was louder and more distorted than the next, and at four separate moments a mosh pit broke out. After two months of frat houses

INSIGHT and nightclubs, I found myself in a place I had never been before, yet still feeling the familiar sensation of a live show. It was different from anything else Yale had to offer. My ﬁve-footnothing body was comfortable pushing to the front of the crowd. The whole thing was just so beautifully authentic — a breath of fresh air from some of the more elite and uncompromising appearances us Yalies sometimes assume. “It did remind me of a lot of other small DIY shows that I have been to,” said Uri Teague ’25. “It’s just cool to see how homegrown it was, and having the bands playing be either from Yale or from New Haven was really cool. It felt very exciting to see a lot of creative energy and then support for that creative energy.” From beginning to end, the show’s surreal energy was captured within the walls of the 216 basement. Yale students, in their diverse and multifaceted glory, were brought together by the powers of headbanging and moshing. Hundreds of students were experiencing the collective push and pull of live music –– whether it was Nutritional Yeast’s fusion of metal, jazz and math rock, Captiøn’s irreverent ode to the modern hip hop indus-

try or Jade Tourniquet’s punk cover of Donovan’s 60s folk song “Season of the Witch.” For one beautiful moment, we found inner calm in the surrounding chaos. The personal spirit of the show was not lost upon us — the atmosphere was intimate enough that every person could stand out in the crowd. As we cheered to our individuality, we were also reminded of our collective strength. “A lot of the bands that played also stuck around for the other shows, and they were dancing with us in the crowd,” said Teague. “It was really fun to dance next to and mosh with the fucking kids who were playing the ﬁrst set during the last set. That was really cool, it felt really personal.”

reﬂect that. Many relied on music as an escape from isolation during the pandemic, and now a record-high number want to stay involved. Jessica Liu ’25, my cohost for an upcoming radio show “lyrical,” echoed this sentiment. “It was really hard to be isolated from my friends and the people that I loved for so long and I feel like music really helped me to make sense of my emotions,” said Liu. “That will deﬁnitely affect the choices I make for what we play, because we’re doing it about poetry too, and that is just another different source for helping me make sense of my emotions. I think it will be nice to connect the two mediums in that way.”

The growing inclusivity of live music on campus Outside of these larger organizations, Yale students have been seeking and initiating creative projects with the goal of further personalizing the experience of performing and viewing music. Brooke Shapiro ’23, a senior in Mixed Company a cappella, has been one of the instigators of smaller scale inclusive performance opportunities as the creator of an intimate live music collective known as “Sweeter Sounds.” With a friend, Shapiro began organizing small concerts in suites and apartments around Yale’s campus.

Before the pandemic, these concerts would be a monthly series of friends supporting each other’s artistry. After the pandemic forced her to take this project online, Shapiro was looking for ways to reinstate Sweeter Sounds as the 20202021 year began. The group had their ﬁrst concert on Nov. 10. “It was nice to sort of bring back the intimate feeling of having a small concert like that with student musicians,” said Shapiro. “We had a bigger turnout with that than ever before, and that was really cool, just to expose student acts to a very diverse audience. We were able to reach every corner of campus it feels like.”

Since Oct. 29, 216 has hosted two more concerts of this scale, featuring Yale-afﬁliated performers such as unpaid intern, hyphenviii, quartzmother, This Is A Land and Emei, as well as Harvard singer Mai Anna and 216 favorite Sargasso. As so many were forced to be isolated, people’s relationships to music went through some changes as well. With the largest class of radio trainees in WYBC’s 80-plus year history, an abundance of new radio shows are set to

// CHARLIE GLEBERMAN

Yale Daily News | 5

INSIGHT Before the pandemic, Sweeter Sounds mostly hosted upperclassmen performers. Juniors, seniors and even former Whiffenpoofs were invited to perform. These performers were the most visible, according to Shapiro, making them most accessible to a newer organization. Shapiro, though, was not satisfied with this limited scope of access. This year, she set out to widen the sphere of performers and audience members that Sweeter Sounds would be able to accommodate. Natalie Brown ’25, a first year, performed at their very first post-pandemic show. Her appearance opened the stage to a greater variety of class years and opened the audience to new and diverse circles of people. “I think that the resounding feedback af-

ter the show was just everyone coming up to us and saying ‘This is what I have been missing,’” said Shapiro. ‘“I haven’t been able to experience music like this in a really long time, and this was just such a great way to do this. This is the best way to be around music.’ So people were really excited about being in this setting.” Shapiro is not alone in this endeavor. Other students have also stepped out with the goal of making performance more accessible. Jonathan Weiss ’24 worked with Pauli Murray’s Head of College Tina Lu to organize an open mic series for student performers of all types within the Pauli Murray community. There were student bands, pianists, singers, musical comedians, poets and actors. Weiss was excited about the possibilities this opened up, for

himself as a performer and an organizer, but also for classmates and peers. He acknowledged that some may not have the most professional experience but truly care about performing and hoped that this sort of stage can allow them the chance to do so. More established performers shared a space with those just discovering their passions and both offered each other optimal support, according to Weiss. “It’s powerful in the sense that it’s spontaneous and you get back a level of accessibility,” said Weiss. “Because someone sitting in the audience can be like ‘Oh, I know a poem. I don’t typically perform, but I’ll come up here.’” As a member of Redhot & Blue, Weiss understands the competitive nature of performance opportunities at Yale. While Yalies love the experience of sitting in

Woolsey Hall listening to some of the world’s best young musicians, opening other avenues is imperative so that they can exist alongside more elite institutional groups. When these avenues do open up, they bring with them support and encouragement, fostering an authentic culture of collaboration in performance. Social media and communications between circles of friends have played a large role in spreading the word about these sorts of opportunities, yet work is still being done on the side of widening this scope and making live music as accessible as possible from all standpoints. “I think there has been generally this atmosphere that is very encouraging and wholesome,” said Weiss. “I think one of my concerns is more on the side of: do people

// CHARLIE GLEBERMAN

6 | DECEMBER 2021

INSIGHT

// CHARLIE GLEBERMAN

know the things that are available? Are there enough things available? And do those sort of people who maybe do not have formal music training, or maybe don’t know that actually they would be capable of doing things on stage, do those people know about those groups that are available … What mattered to me about it [the open mic] was that it’s not the kind of thing that you have to rush or audition for.” Student performers, though, have taken advantage of these opportunities as a way to step out into their

own. Priya Vasu ’23, a transfer student now in their first semester at Yale, organized an impromptu band to perform at Branford College’s Fall Festival. Vasu did not see an existing outlet at Yale that reﬂected their desires as a performer and musician, yet they were willing to create their own. Upon receiving an email only ten days prior to Fall Festival that Branford needed a student band, Vasu reached out to friends to organize practices and went on to perform at the festival.

Now, Vasu has connected themselves with two additional projects and is looking more towards a focus on creating and performing their own original music rather than playing covers. “I deﬁnitely had to, I guess, go out of my own way to create the opportunity,” said Vasu. “Because if I hadn’t put myself out there, I don’t think I would have been able to get connected to these other things or meet people who were already in the music scene. I would say that it was accessible once I got to that point … I deﬁnite-

ly had to put myself out there, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing.” That becomes the crux of what was missing during the pandemic, at Yale and throughout the world: face to face intimate connection. Concerts are one of the most unbridled displays of human passion and collectivism. The speciﬁc energy they bring to both performer and viewer creates a relationship that is equal parts intimate and ephemeral. This begs the largest question at hand: Is live music just a celebration of intimacy and human

connection at its core? Does its return epitomize the very essence of what the pandemic stripped from people? Or is it just for the sake of entertainment, symbolizing people’s readiness to enjoy themselves once again? Perhaps its true meaning is situated somewhere in between. I will always be a ﬁrm believer in the ﬁrst option, because for me, music is the closest thing we have to truly understanding one another. Everyone’s reasons for celebrating the revival of concerts are different –– the spirit of live music will be here for all of them.

// CHARLIE GLEBERMAN

Yale Daily News | 7

POEM

ATLANTICISM By Miranda Wollen

the inviolate red rock overlooking the greyed connecticut shore watches sleepily as we clamber barefoot toward the sea bottles and books and cheaply made rings turning our fingers the color of the coastal tide pools we skip over and around in the quiet of the mid-afternoon lethargy which serves us as air and there are kisses on sweat -salted collarbones while we smirk at the teenagers playing overly simplistic rap and drinking watery beer below on their dingy speedboats as the sun softens over the crowns of our heads

we prostrate ourselves on twin lounge chairs eggshell-worn and adorned with small leaves in this off-broadway facsimile entitled junetime: (on domesticity) pretending to read long impossible books crawlingly plucking at the lines imprisoned and dogmatic in the choking pleasure of playing house i am standing still without curled inhalation for the first time, windkissed and looking out from atop a peak green with moss — it will not last the month

//JESSAI FLORES 8 | December 2021

PERSONAL ESSAY

Hues and Shades

How art camp showed me the innocence and instability of wonder

BY SARAH FENG

here’s a little boy wearing a Spiderman mask painting a very messy and very big blue shark on his corner of the wooden mural resting flat on the ground. He’s giving the final touches to the shark’s wide mouth, painting rows of white teeth — and he’s very, very excited about his shark. In fact, he’s very, very excited about all of his sharks: just a few hours before, in our artist trading card exercise, he painted a series of them. A bright pink megalodon unlatching its jaw, a blue big white chomping in our direction, a profile of a slim little bull shark, a green tiger shark rowing itself merrily through the deeps. “Who wants my megalodon?” he yells loudly, standing up off his chair,

// KATHERINE CHUI

brandishing it in the air. Immediately a response resounds, “I want your megalodon! I’ll trade you my cherry tree!” The boy’s Zentangle-corner of the wooden mural is complete with a thick blue background of paint. When I ask him why he likes sharks, the answer is so obvious that he has to pause and look at me to see if I’m joking. “Because sharks are neat.” “Do you know that they make thousands of teeth? They can replace almost their entire mouth,” I say, prompting him. I’m curious about this kid’s curiosity. Over the last five days of CRS Art Camp, the summer art camp that my friends and I are working at, he’s come to camp wearing a different shark shirt

— and on top of that, his apron, which he’s decorated with a big aqua-blue shark in Sharpie. “Oh, of course,” he says, standing up. He’s dropped his paints now; he’s done, smearing his blue-stained fingers on his apron. “They make hundreds and thousands of teeth. Scientists go to the bottom of the sea and pick up all the dropped teeth, and there’s so many of them. You know the megalodon? Once, they figured out how big the shark was by how big its teeth were. They were so big they couldn’t have been from any other shark.” He talks for at least three or four minutes straight, leisurely, contemplatively. When I was ten, I would hold my stuffed animal, a fluffy little

guinea pig Webkinz I’d nicknamed Cho Cho, in my arms and write pages and pages of crookedly-handwritten short stories. Once, my family had returned from a ski trip late at night. A flat metal clock sat in the corner, its dull green eyes flashing, the turquoise digits of the numbers unempathetic. I felt wound up, the air vacuumed as tight as a bell jar. My mother was standing in the doorway, frustrated with me to no end as I cried, “I’m going to grow up and Cho Cho will never be the same to me. I’m going to grow up and I won’t like Cho Cho the same way anymore. I’m going to grow up and … ” My mother snapped at me to go to sleep, and I bit my quivering lip and tried not to cry. In that way

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PERSONAL ESSAY

small things feel emotionally devastating for a toddler, I clutched Cho Cho to my chest almost jealously when we went on vacation, tucked her into bed every night beside me, shed real tears when stuffing came loose on her foot and sewed her up again and again until her fur turned kinked and overstitched. Staring Cho Cho in her dark, beaded eyes, my 10-year-old self remembered, with a spasm of fear, a television show I’d seen my parents watching a week ago, in which a woman in a wheelchair attempted to drown herself after she’d wrongly thought that her love was unrequited. It was as if the character’s vocabulary of emotions had been entirely replaced, these darkly dramaticized dialogues full of tumultuous envy and scorn and love, the magnitude and gravitas of which nebulously hovered in the cracks of my imagination. It was as if all of the wonder and love for animals like Cho Cho would evaporate into numbness, as if Cho Cho would disappear and take with her the notion of everything magical and natural, and worst of all, I wouldn’t even care or remember. When we are older, where do we go when we dream? Our dreamscapes might no longer defy gravity and reason — we find ourselves rooted to the banalities and complexities of human relationships, like ambition, greed and pain. Eight years ago, as my mother left the room, the door clanging shut with her exasperation, I fixed my gaze on the acidic green digits of the clock, squinting through my tears. Cho Cho meant making up stories about gerbil families in my

10 | December 2021

notebooks; she meant dashing to the library with my friends after school to stitch together outfits for her on the computer screen. I loved her for no reason other than the fact that I wanted to love something. I feared growing up, I feared losing the mystery of animal companionship, I feared that the magic would be lost. I feared what had happened in the winter months of my gap year.

“There is such a ﬁne line between the hard machinery of our bodies and the thoughts we produce.” “And you know the sharks have a lateral line, right?” I prompt again, now extremely curious about how much this kid knows about sharks. With my clasped hands, I mimic the shape of the lateral line slicing through the water and the sharks with their normal horizontal movement, their studded, bristled skin abrasive and muscular but their motion smooth through the water. “How they use electricity to sense their surroundings?” His paint is drying now, the massive shark grinning on the wood, and he stares with concentration into the distance. When I say this, he nods instantly. He doesn’t smile because he’s very serious about

these topics. They’re natural to him — second nature, simple and pure. “Oh, yeah. The lateral lines. It’s really neat. They can sense the pressure around them and get the prey. They run all through the sides of the body and they use electricity. It’s very smart. These sharks are so fast, so good at getting around. But it’s crazy because we don’t know anything about sharks. We don’t really know anything.” We don’t know much about sharks, but we do know about these lateral lines. Sharks, like many other cartilaginous fish, have ampullae of Lorenzini, which are a series of electroreceptors that line their bodies in a spattering of tiny specks across the smooth grey flaps of their skin, forming tube-like structures just underneath and parallel to the skin. These electroreceptors are sensitive to electric fields generated by activity all around them in the ocean. Think of a shark deep in the ocean, the cartilage of its body clicking to form a lethal sinusoid, speed whipping through it like a blade of wind. The electricity around it is something of a series of curtains just whooshing by. Imagine those signals clicking between the water and the ampullae and the shark’s brain, brilliant filaments cascading back and forth, spineless tinkles of wind chimes. Like humans, there is such a fine line between the hard machinery of our bodies and the thoughts we produce. Like humans, they sense the environment around them in ways that are beyond verbal. The month before I counseled this summer art camp, one of my co-counselors and I were living in New York City, where we visited

PERSONAL ESSAY

// KATHERINE CHUI

the Brooklyn Aquarium. There was one hallway in which you stride beneath a great glass tunnel so that you feel immersed in the water. There was one shark that took my breath away — the whitetip reef shark, soft and gelatinous, its edges shrubby with chromatic light, sort of like someone had layered a gauze over an old film and all the grain came out. He was a vintage shark, dapper and whiskered with age, and the soft underbelly was as white as cream. In the massive, wall-sized tanks, there are at least 10 or 20 sharks all moving about, some resting sleepily on the floor in a row of chrome-grey bodies, others floating about with beady, testy eyes, ready to live vicariously through us, others self-aware of their lethality and proud in their aloofness, swirling about just shy of our cameras. The wall tanks are the ones meant to mimic depth, with the back of the tank concealed with darkness so you feel as if you are staring straight into a cross section

of the Atlantic Ocean. Like the student said — fast as whips, able to pounce on their prey and so finetuned to their environments with their electroreceptors, bodies like bullets, as muscled as dancers. People are like sharks. We’re always sort of blind to our environments. We often live our lives half-consciously, under the influence of our emotions, like pointillist figures floating past a lake, and yet our bodies, our faces, are lined with hundreds of thousands of ampullae of Lorenzini, receptors opening and closing to the dark. What allows us to lift meaning from our “ocean” is what those receptors pick up: how we read people’s faces, and how we allow ourselves to react, that beautiful and inexplicable chemical equilibrium constantly in flux back and forth as we interact and engage with one another and find ourselves changing others, and being changed by others. That is to say: sharks are neat. The kid said it better.

A few years after Cho Cho became less of a prominent figure in my life and I focused my attention on more fruitful things like Club Penguin, I was lying on a grey cabinet in my aunt’s office and listening to a song. She had bought us dragonfruit and she was playing a farming game on her Microsoft computer. The air conditioning was gentle and lovely. It was August in Shenzhen, the humidity thick, and later that week we would go to the neighborhood pool. The song I was listening to was called 红蜻蜓 by a Chinese trio called the Tiger Brothers, and the lyrics go something like this: 飞呀飞呀看那红色蜻蜓飞在蓝色天空游戏在风中不断追逐他的梦天空是永恒的家拍摄定妆照大地就是他的王国飞翔是生活 A red dragonfly spinning through the air as neon blue as

Yale Daily News | 11

PERSONAL ESSAY

water. Laughs emanating upwards on a summer day. Spinning upwards, continuously striving towards the glow of the sun, the dragonfly explores the sky, its domain, its realm, its home. The horizon is a limit it eagerly aims to approach, then surpass. Flying is its life. When the chorus approached, I had to stop the song. A white-hot existential panic overcame me as I swung my legs over the locker. In the chorus, we learn that the red dragonflies fly less and less as the narrator grows older. As the narrator sees more of reality, the red dragonflies drop, one by one, and disappear from our sight. The chorus chilled me with its nonchalance about dreams that faded, and that chill would harden and expand into a desperation to cling onto my current self and a panicked fear for the flatline of the future, the empty stretch of nothingness awaiting me. I broke out into inconsolable tears as this chorus approached. I kept imagining the grey, dreadful stretch of growing up that lay before us, in which I would lose all what was precious to me: the love of belting parody songs and mixing brownies into milk at lunch and stealing flags to play capture-the-flag with my closest friends, of the sunshine that rained over our games and the feelings of being carefree. I wasn’t scared of losing these actions themselves. I was scared that my friends would grow older and forget about me, and I’d still be young and hopeful and standing in that field, waiting for someone to come tug the flag off of my shirt or talk to me about Annabeth Chase. I was scared that my parents would grow old and wizened and I would still be waiting for them to take mile-long walks with me around the neighborhood to get steaming hot buns. I was scared that the world was full of mundanities and badness and selfishness that would indelibly chip away at you until you lost everything. I

12 | December 2021

was scared that everybody would move on. Most of all, I was scared that I would move on — that my 14-year-old self, or my 18-year-old self, would wander off, dissociate from my younger self so full of hope and excitement and idealism. On that metal cabinet, I cried until my body turned feverish with chills. My aunt asked me what was wrong, but I couldn’t explain. Lost youth felt too fragile for me to bring up with words.

“Art is a chemistry between what we know and what we believe.” Other students have begun their corners of the mural — pink trees, unicorns, all spaced out in various orientations, some refined and intricate with flowers, others just swabs of abstract paint. Sometimes the kids paint in silence, bent quietly over their canvases, sketching and dabbing and flecking stars over their sky or feathering their flamingoes. Other times they are loud, thrilled, tossing babbled remarks back and forth about their combined paintings, giggling loudly as they mix paints on their transparent plates together, smashing pieces of play dough together into fruit plates and rainbows, artfully drawing watercolor flowers and commenting on their future series of dragon portraits. There’s one student who’s polite, brisk and sharp, always on her toes; her friend, who languishes more, is a bit confused, but has the right spirit; his little sister,

who is so tiny she seems like she could be a Thumbelina but has a loud, chirpy voice; two siblings who are quiet but excel in lesson time; and two twins who talk with solemn, brilliant energy, wise beyond their years. They paint go-karts and silhouettes of foxes on beaches, and they are so, so proud of what they have created, and they mix their paints carefully, but not with the practiced, tired carefulness of anyone trying to make anything look good. They squint at their blobbed piles of vermillion and black and douse them together on the plate until they grin, satisfied with themselves. They dab their hands in puffy paint and trade cards back and forth. They think the world of the world, if that makes sense. Novelist and poet Margaret Atwood once said in an interview, “Ghosts are real to those who see them.” The same is true for these children, but in the opposite direction. Their purity wraps around me and reminds me how much of a child I am, and how little I know, reminds me to regard the people around me with more innocence and forgiveness. For those children at camp, the reason they decide to paint some images, and pass on others is a mark of that unique equilibrium between an individual and their surroundings. Art is a chemistry between what we know and what we believe. The younger you are, the more that line disappears. What are the feelings that I remember made me feel so boundless as a child that feel so normal now, so humanly understandable? Lying on that locker in China, scooping iced passion fruit from the spoon with my aunt; skipping through the streets of Shenzhen and somersaulting into the public pools with little kids who I didn’t know but was puffed up with courage to befriend. I had forgotten about Cho Cho but was newly consumed

PERSONAL ESSAY

with the fear of school and of expectations. Now, the buildings flanking the tight streets of Shenzhen loom less enormous and god-like to me; the glittering signs on the doors are at the level of my eye, but the people hurrying past in their thin tank tops in the summer or rain-sugared ponchos in the winter — it’s easier to recognize the patterns of stress and grief and joy that carve their beautiful, stranger faces. The Romantic poets have a word for the wonder felt by children — the sublime. It’s being young again and being awed by the vastness of nature and the endlessness of the world. When I sit by that student painting a massive shark, both of us wearing aprons splotched with Sharpie and paint and musing very seriously about which adaptations of sharks we like the best, here’s the thing I realize: it is not the quality of being young that makes you feel wondrous; it’s the quality of feeling wondrous that makes you feel young. I’m less than onefifth through life — and even by the end of life, so much of the world remains an unexplored deep ocean. To be young is to approach the next day as if you are growing up still, to search

for that wonder, to find its existence. Wonder morphs and crystallizes into its different forms that will expand upon themselves. Without realizing it, I’ve gravitated towards the same topics year after

me, understanding the science behind the ecosystems. During my gap year, reading and writing science fiction became a fixation. Thinking about the architecture of a hypothetical underwater world post-climate apoca-

year: water, change, love. When I was eleven, I was obsessed with the mysticality of underwater worlds and mermaids. In my senior year, my marine biology class reawakened my imagination. Once again I was fascinated with the deeps, imagining light splitting the waves into a kaleidoscope and breaking into a thousand pearls around

lypse, I felt overwhelmed by the possibilities. Since I was young, I’ve loved whales and sharks. Learning about the intricacies of how they live, prey and sense in my senior year gave me permission to reinhabit the lifestyle of a little kid scribbling in her nature sketchbook and feverishly taping leaves to pages. The funny thing is, I hav-

// KATHERINE CHUI

en’t lost my curiosities at all. Sometimes they lie asleep for weeks, even years, but when they reawaken, it is with even more depth and complexity than I could have imagined before. At the final gallery, paintings, cards, projects and lessons decorate the walls in canvases and papers of all shapes and sizes. Music plays softly from the speakers as students tug their parents around. They show off their acrylic deer they learned in lessons and their charcoal still-lives which they produced with such steady concentration and detailed blending; they stream outside to see their artist trading cards pinned up on the shuttered window and their final projects propped up with name cards on the tables. It’s a day of chaos and sunlight. Last year, when I asked my mom what I should do I when I was older, she looked at me and said, 你已经长大了。You’ve already grown up. I didn’t know what to do with that, although it certainly didn’t strike me with the existential fear that my younger self thought it would. She’s right. The red dragonflies are still flying. I’m closing my eyes and letting wonder lead me wherever it likes.

Yale Daily News | 13

AUDIO ESSAY

SCAN TO GO TO AUDIO ESSAY

Yale Symphony Orchestra Halloween Show BY OLIVER GUINAN 14 | December 2021

// EMILY CAI

FEATURE

DONATIONS AND THE CURRICULUM THE STRUGGLE TO DEFINE ACADEMIC FREEDOM BY YASMINE CHOKRANE

he Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy was extraordinary for several reasons. One of the reasons it was so distinctive is that the group of graduate and undergraduate students were not only able to question power dynamics in a classroom setting, but were also endowed with their own sense of power. In setting out to equip the future leaders of the United States, the program gave students a path to this power, shared among world leaders and international authorities, introducing it to them in the safety of the classroom. And for a significant number of students, that ability to simulate these experiences was one of the most rewarding aspects of the program. “It is a phenomenal training ground

for thinkers,” said Clint Bartlet, an alumnus of the “Studies in Grand Strategy for Global Affairs” course from 2016-17. “It’s meant to help people assimilate knowledge, and we need that. In the next century, we need this kind of problem solving.” This attention to problem solving, in many ways, is the centerpiece for the curriculum. This is further made possible by the length of the program. The program requires an application process with a deadline in late November each year and continues into two semesters — with the addition of a summer research funding opportunity. The amount of time spent enables the program to complete its aim, as articulated by the Grand Strategy website, “to provide students with a comprehensive approach to achieving large ends with limited means.” This is partly done through access to faculty members that are well-established in the fields of government, military and other industries that function at the national level, as well as an extensive reading list with authors like Thucididyes, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass.

“I felt very impoverished for not having studied the classics at an undergraduate level,” Bartlett said, who joined the program as a graduate student. “And so when I saw this on the curriculum, I thought, ‘This is amazing.’ Not only do I get to read this stuff, but I get to read it within the context of very, very impressive and experienced teachers or faculty.” But beyond just interrogating these texts, students were often expected to employ the lessons from the text. Bartlett described one of his most memorable experiences in Grand Strategy as one of the assignments he had to complete for the class: “You had to produce a policy brief to the [federal] administration. So we have to look at this kind of foreign policy, this kind of moral standing, this kind of value, etc. I will never forget the kind of studying around that, no doubt, was being mimicked on a much broader scale, just ourselves.” And it was this notion of “grand strategy,” of “significant, massive, highly-scaled kind of thinking that drew [him] like a magnet,” which has been a staple of the curriculum since its conception in 2000. Notably, there have been a few changes since professor Beverly Gage’s appointment as head of the program. Gage, who began leading the program in 2017, expanded the curriculum to include more

Yale Daily News | 15

FEATURE discussions of domestic policy that included grassroots social and civil rights movements that were in better dialogue with the current moment. However, not everyone has approved of this change. This September, it was revealed that there was an attempt by two significant donors of the program to influence the course. An advisory board largely composed of conservative figures, including Henry A. Kissinger, former secretary of state under former President Richard M. Nixon and the recipient of Gage’s largest objection, was instituted. This advisory board would oversee the management of the curriculum to ensure that the program gives space to conservative figures and ideologies. In response to the donor pressure, Gage resigned. And with her departure from this course arrived a series of concerns from the Yale school community about the state of academic freedom at the University. Donor influence is a concern that exists in many institutions, as not only is their influence dramatic, but often implicit in the sense that the extent of their influence is not usually public knowledge. So when the fact of these donors’ influence became just that, Bartlett was certainly concerned, but as he put it, “I have no doubt that these things have happened before. I think that this kind of question has been tested, maybe even as early as universities. And I think that’s important to give some context, that it is not new.” The Context While the idea of the universitas has been established since the 15th century, it wasn’t until the early 20th century — with the advent of industrialization — that a sense for universities’ economic and social roles, via engaging with outside organizations

16 | December 2021

and identifying their positionality to government, began to materialize. For the most part, universities operated under religious authority, specifically the pope in Europe. As universities started to rely on private and public funding sources, the question of academic freedom emerged: professors and scholars began to qualify the definition beyond the boundaries of inquiry that was brought about by religious reformation. In the United States, the threat to academic freedom reared its head during the Red Scare, the mass hysteria concerning communism that expanded during the ’40s and ’50s. A national debate rang as attempts were made to dismiss Communist Party members from teaching positions, labeling faculty members as “subversive” and “communist.” Teachers became terrified of teaching any subject matter that seemed controversial, so much so that self-censorship — in addition to state-sanctioned censorship — often took place. Academic freedom became tied to the idea of national security. During this era of McCarthyism, the practice of publicly probing the presence of communism in the United States via public trials and persistent accusation, the concerned intervention of ideology into academic spheres became evident. This is partly demonstrated in the 6-3 1952 Supreme Court decision in Adler v. Board of Education to uphold the Feinberg Law, a New York statute which banned any teacher that called for the overthrow of the government from teaching in public schools. Outside organizations like the National Education Association would publish weekly articles about the threat of communism to education, sometimes listing the names of suspected educators as a way to stir up suspicion.

The threat to academics was also seen at institutions of higher education. In 1952, the Internal Security Subcommittee of the United States Senate conducted hearings to investigate “the subversive influences into the nation’s educational system.” Thus, this threat seen at the legislative level was eventually enforced at the institutional one. Specific colleges, and certain professors teaching within them, were called upon to ask about the way in which their classroom contributed to this nationally identified security threat. On Oct. 13, 1952, a New York University associate professor of English suspected of subversion was called before the subcommittee. Invoking his First and Fifth amendment rights, he refused to respond to the committee’s questions and afterwards was immediately suspended by the chancellor of NYU, who claimed the professor had made “a breach of his duty to the government and to the university.” This was the case at other institutions with varying severities of reactions: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Cornell relieved faculty members at full pay; John Hopkins University retained the accused faculty member at full salary, allowing him time to properly commit himself to his defense; conversely at Temple University, a professor of philosophy was unanimously not reinstated, nor was an associate professor of physics at the Ohio State University. Eventually, the national temper quelled, and the concern for communism calmed down. But the threats to academic freedom did not cease after the Cold War era. The dissonance between the intellectual happenings of an institution and the politics of its administration contribute to the dilemma over academic freedom in university curriculums today. “The competence of the administration is not in teaching, the competence

FEATURE of the administration is not in research,” professor Robert Post explained. Post is a Sterling Professor of law at Yale Law School, specializing in First Amendment constitutional law. He has published a series of books on the topic, including “Democracy, Expertise, Academic Freedom: A First Amendment Jurisprudence for the Modern State.” As he explained, the threat to academic freedom often comes when the two interests conflict. He continued to explain: “And so when they make judgments, they’re making judgments from a managerial perspective.” Thus, the administration’s priority is more concerned with ensuring academics are taking place, as opposed to its freedoms. How academic freedom is defined at the institutional level varies as each institution generally sets the policy for themself. Academic freedom generally contains four components: the freedom of teaching, freedom of research and publication, freedom of extramural speech — the right of an educator to speak as a citizen — and then freedom of intramural speech — the right to participate in matters of community governance by speaking about decisions affecting the university. “Academic freedom means that the freedom of a professor to do any of these things is to be determined by the professional standards of competence applicable to the professor,” Post stated. When it comes to academic freedom for students, “we don’t have any account that’s commonly agreed upon,” Post said. “And typically when we speak about academic freedom for students, we speak about it as the negative inverse of academic freedom for faculty. So if the faculty has an obligation not to indoctrinate a student then that student has an academic freedom

// SOPHIE HENRY

not to be indoctrinated.” But what happens when that freedom is violated? The Ambiguity When news first broke out about Gage stepping down, another professor — who is currently in the midst of a lawsuit concerning academic freedom — saw immediate resonance with her own experience. “I was inundated with messages when [Gage’s] case became public,” profes-

sor Bandy Lee admitted. “There was an obvious link in people’s minds.” Bandy X. Lee was a formerly Yale-affiliated faculty member in the Department of Psychiatry in the School of Medicine as well as Yale College. Similar to Gage, her situation amassed an abundance of attention after she was fired for a tweet she wrote commenting menting on the Trump administration. On Jan. 2, 2020, she tweeted, “Alan Dershowitz’s employing the odd use of ‘perfect’ — not even a synonym — might be dismissed as ordinary influence in most contexts. However, given the severity

Yale Daily News | 17

FEATURE and spread of ‘shared psychosis’ among just about all of Donald Trump’s followers, a different scenario is more likely. Which scenario? That he has wholly taken on Trump’s symptoms by contagion. There is even proof: his bravado toward his opponent with a question about his own sex life — in a way that is irrelevant to the actual lawsuit — shows the same grandiosity and delusional-level impunity.” Dershowitz, a lawyer on Trump’s legal team and recipient of Lee’s comment, responded to the tweet with a letter to Yale administrators accusing Lee of violating the ethics rules as listed by the American Psychiatric Association, calling for disciplinary action in the process. Since then, Lee has pursued legal action for what she affirms is an “unlawful termination.” As articulated in the lawsuit, she has criticized Yale as having committed “the tort of negligent misrepresentation by not adhering to its policies on academic freedom.” Lee’s complaints against the University are not without substance, for the policies concerning academic freedom are in place, as University President Salovey reminded everyone of “Yale’s unwavering commitment to academic freedom” in a public statement after Gage’s resignation that was reported by The New York Times. Salovey promises, “Yale is committed to free inquiry and academic

18 | December 2021

freedom — these are the university’s foundational values and have been my own over the course of my 35 years on the faculty.” “It’s one thing to speak glowingly about academic freedom and freedom of speech because it’s very easy to speak about those things in the abstract,” Steinbaugh

Defense Programs of The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which is composed of a group of attorneys who defend the constitutional rights and civil liberties of both students and faculty. As Steinbaugh explained, the ease of speaking on academic freedom in the abstract is part

dom of expression. But the differing understandings of academic freedom by entities at different levels of the institution is part of what cements this ambiguity. Yet the question of academic freedom didn’t feel this confounding to Lee, at first. When she left Harvard in 2002, she sought a teaching position at Yale because “its scholarship felt very genuine and pure.” In her eyes, Yale was distinct “for its lack of compromise and corruption, the way that other institutions were heading.” This represents a temptation by some, including Lee, to identify a cultural trend. “In general,” she said, “administration — and the preservation of institutions as an end in itself — has detracted from the goals of education, medicine or any other field that is used to lead directions in the past.” This is why Lee now believes that, when it comes to matters of academic freedom, she doesn’t think “Yale [was] unique, nor [was] it at the forefront.”

said. “But the important thing is to watch what institutions do when it becomes an actual enforceable obligation.” Adam Steinbaugh is an attorney and the director of the Individual Rights

of what enables institutions to evade practicing the policy itself. A policy commitment to freedom of expression or academic freedom has not been entirely universalized. There’s the legal definition, at least as it relates to free-

There is something to be said for the persistence of this type of cases: this past November three professors filed a lawsuit against the University of Florida for suppressing their right to offer testimony in a voting rights case. In August, allegations were made against the University of North Carolina for a meeting between Israeli consular officials, the dean of college and a member from the U.S. House of Rep-

FEATURE resentatives to organize the termination of the graduate student who was teaching a course entitled, “The Conflict Over Israel/Palestine.” Because of the succession of controversies in the news, there’s an aspect of these violations that feel inevitable: there’s no way to properly protect the ideal of academic freedom. But some people are more hopeful. “I don’t think [these violations are] inherently unavoidable,” said Steinbaugh. “And there’s certainly things that administrators can do to mitigate that risk or mitigate that possibility. One is to make sure that they have strong policies protecting freedom of expression and academic freedom. And it’s not enough just to have a policy: you actually have to respect it.” Yet academic freedom is not only considered at the policy level; it’s considered at the legislative one as well. “One would hope that the legal definition is neutral,” Steinbaugh said. “It is supposed to protect people no matter what. That’s not that is not how it always works in practice.” The legal definition of academic freedom, the one that occurs at an institutional level, isn’t always applied equally. Part of that has to do with the history: “so much of the

jurisprudence and the policy commitments to academic freedom arise from the Red Scare era for having supposedly subversive views, because they were coming from the left,” Steinbaugh asserted. But the other part is simply the reality of politics on university campuses, in which partisanship has become even more relevant in questions of academic freedom and access to colleges in general. However, beyond just the issue of polarization, if we consider both Lee’s and Gage’s situations, there’s a larger political implication involved, in which the sanctity of scholarship is threatened by a political agenda. Particularly in Gage’s case, we return to a question of power dynamics. With the control of the curriculum, donor influence and the liberties of Gage all called into question, academic freedom has not only been considered at multiple levels, but also in the way in which it relates to authority. In this way, the Grand Strategy program, and the controversy surrounding it, has asked what it’s intended to: who holds the power, both inside and outside the classroom.

Yale Daily News | 19

MIXED MULTIMEDIA

WALKING AROUND

Impressions from Cross Campus BY ISA DOMINGUEZ

beige couch was set in the center of Cross Campus. A white table set with a snake plant, a Dunkin Donuts coffee jug, and a speaker playing “Budapest,” “Tongue Tied,” “Redbone,” and “Let Me Adore You.” A girl on a bench nearby sang along. Some people in the group hugged each other and chatted while, others worked on their computers. Two of them ran with an inflatable couch, capturing the air the way one would capture butterflies. Most of them wrapped themselves in blankets. It was reminiscent of the beginning of the Friends theme song. “This is what Yale’s like everyday,” one of them said, talking to a large tour group passing by.

“I had a cute little picnic here with some members of the rugby team as a study break last semester. We had cute little fruit and we [were] eating, chilling, vibes, music, you know, all that. Deleted the 20 page paper from my brain.”

Destinie Brooks ’22

Passing people is my favorite pastime. Every week in October, I chose to set my striped blanket on Cross Campus and study outside. My dad told me “Eres muy palida” — that I needed more “Vitamin D” — plus I loved waving at people that I knew, or overhearing bits of conversations that, out of context, could serve as an interesting quote for creative inspiration or as a distraction. The Saturday that people placed the couch was a chilly day. I sat on Cross Campus for five hours. It was a random day; I didn’t know who I would talk to or what would happen. But multiple events happened in that short time span. Two hours after the first group of students placed the beige couch, four students walked out of Berkeley’s north court with a white couch and set it on the side of the lawn. They came out with a television, an extension cord, a white-and-red carpet, a tall floor lamp, and three chairs. They were watching Tom and Jerry and Roadrunner. The first group called out, “You’re not going to join us?” At one point, when the second group had gone to grab more furniture from their common room — a carpet, floor lamp, chairs — the first group almost succeeded in stealing the white couch. They tried to lift it when one of the members of the second group caught them. A friend of mine, shaking her head, approached me after this interaction. “Why is there always something fucking unhinged happening on Cross Campus?”

20 | December 2021

Isa Dominguez ’24 (author) and Christina Young ‘24

MIXED MULTIMEDIA “This place is so beautiful. I saw a lot of people [taking a] graduation photo there [on the steps of Sterling]. So I was actually coming here to take my picture there. I thought this is the most Yale view, right?”

2 Anne Cutler ’82 and her daughter, Sandra Redjali ‘24

Sasha Lioutikova ’23

Jee Park UConn ’22

Last year, more people lingered on the green. “Last spring, when people were really starved for social interaction, Cross Campus was the place to be,” Daniel Pita ‘21 said. “I remember coming here, I was gonna meet some friends. And it was filled, it was bustling. It seemed like some city center, [with] a ton of community energy.”

“One time I came here to play Frisbee with some friends at night… it was super cold…. We were just feeling kind of funky and wanted to play around. And so we just played some Frisbee on campus and it was really good cause it was so empty and it’s such a nice, wonderful wide open space.”

This fall semester, with the transition to in-person classes and the temperature dropping every week, most students I talked to mentioned that they typically cross Cross Campus to get to class or to meet up and go somewhere else. “I’m not on Cross Campus as much as I like to just be outside,” said Annabella Lugo ‘24. “I feel like lately it’s been kind of empty.” That Saturday, most of the people I talked to were passing by, on their way to someplace else. Some were lugging backpacks, others were talking with their relatives or friends during a brief coffee break. I asked Yale students, an alum, and a University of Connecticut student what they wish they could do if they spent more time on it and what their favorite Cross Campus memories are.

Yale Daily News | 21

MIXED MULTIMEDIA

THE SECOND GROUP OF STUDENTS, SOME FROM JONATHAN EDWARDS COLLEGE AND OTHERS FROM BERKELEY COLLEGE

Richard Hausman ’24 and Pradz Sapre ’24 “enjoying a lovely picnic.”

22 | December 2021

After the first two months at Yale, days and weeks blur together. It’s hardly a gradual process — homework, readings, p-sets accumulate as the semester continues. Routines are established, and Google Calendars are filled. Cross Campus changes too: it recently has become more quiet. But it doesn’t mean that people are using it less. It’s a dynamic space, one that is simultaneously insignificant as a place that one can walk through and significant as a place one can linger, relax on a couch, watch cartoons. It’s a break from Yale, it’s a way to get to Yale, it’s a way to see Yale come alive in a way that is simply human. When I asked a member of the second group, Jake Slaughter ‘24, why they took out a couch, he shrugged. “We saw [the first group] hanging out and we thought that it was a great idea,” he said. “This is a good memory that we’re in the process of making… I’m just happy to be here.”

MIXED MULTIMEDIA

CROSS CAMPUS ACTIVITIES

“Me and [one of my] apartment mates from the summer… we laid out a blanket and we were stargazing spontaneously because we were originally doing work and it started getting late. And then we just looked up at the sky and stargazed and talked. And I think that’s one of my favorite memories here so far.”

Josh Chough ‘23+1 “It’s always been a dream of mine to have a little picnic on the green. My first year, I used to hang up my hammock. And it’s funny because if you look at the trees, there’s space so that none of them are close enough to hang a hammock in between, but you can hang a hammock in between a light post and a tree. There were other people that hung up their hammocks too. So we almost had a club going on, but alas.”

Hannah Xiong ‘24

PHOTOS BY SHARON LI ILLUSTRATIONS BY ZOE BERG AND JESSAI FLORES

Yale Daily News | 23

POEM

GRAFFITI IN THE STACKS BY SURAJ SINGAREDDY

There are incredibly few spaces on campus where students have the opportunity to be anonymous, and the two most popular spaces are complete opposites in terms of history, function and medium. Sterling Memorial Library’s stacks are just over 90 years old, while @yale.confessions opened its virtual doors just a few months ago. My goal was to find out whether both of these anonymous spaces ended up revealing the same things about the student body. Are there similar themes that emerge when we’re allowed to say anything without fear of repercussions? Is everyone secretly thinking the same things? Could we even count on anonymity to make people be honest? I, for one, think so. As one piece of stacks graffiti so eloquently puts it: “Something about high, lonely places makes you want to write profundities.” What do these profundities amount to? Why do these secrets matter to us? I think they reveal what lurks in the shadow of the University — everything we’re too scared to say to each other. Yes, we have complaints and worries, but underneath all that is still a sense of hope and wonder. Hopefully, this poem provides a snapshot of all of that and lets whoever reading it know that “everyone else is dealing with the same shit.”

24 | December 2021

//SOHPIE HENRY

POEM

Ghosts Poetry created from pieces of graffiti in the stacks and confessions from @yale.confessions on Instagram. Every word below was written by someone else, with only some added punctuation.

//ZOE BERG, SOPHIE HENRY AND JESSAI FLORES

VII I am | no more than a drop in the ocean, | but I | was here

Yale Daily News | 25

PAINTING

UTOPIA BY CATHERINE KWON

Moving frequently growing up, I was exposed to people of various backgrounds and became increasingly observant of the different ways people think, act and treat one another. My work explores the dynamics of human interaction; through extensive use of the human figure, symbolism and metaphor, I tell stories rooted in both personal experience and my observations about others. “Utopia,” partly inspired by Thomas More’s “Utopia” and partly by my experiences working with children, is a three-dimensional acrylic painting on several resin layers and questions childhood, innocence and morality in the context of today’s society. The magical-looking background — representing a seemingly perfect environment to be in — is juxtaposed by the skeptical expression on the child’s face; in reality, no system that theoretically eliminates greed and selfishness will truly overpower humans’ innate and inherent lack of goodness.

26 | December 2021

// CATHERINE KWON

BASiL

PROFILE

a local restaurant in transition BY JOHN NGUYEN

diners. Pictures also adorn the walls, including multiple Buddha panels and statues and a framed meadow with red, orange and brown hues. “We wanted to use the decorations and show we’re proud of our culture,” Yu said. “To make customers feel like they are at home.”

Basil Finding a Home at Yale

n the corner of Howe Street and Whalley Avenue, close to the Broadway Triangle, stands Basil Restaurant. While strolling beneath the stars, one might mistake the brown-bricked building for an apartment. Upon closer inspection, one is greeted by a sign in white typeface that identifies the Asian American restaurant; a basil leaf, adorably small, replaces the dot above the “i.” A toddler scampers to the takeout table, with bags of rice looming over her. Seconds later, a masked woman, dressed in black pants, shirt and apron, her hair in a ponytail, calls out to her daughter. She exits the kitchen and greets me from the cash register. It’s Lia Yu, manager of Basil Restaurant. “Hello, John! How are you? How are classes?” Her voice is high and warm, like a mother inviting strangers into her home. An Uber Eats driver comes up to the take-out table, and a group of youth are waiting behind. Although there are no places for customers to sit — the chairs that usually populate the

Basil isn’t Tjia’s first restaurant. The family used to own Kari in New Haven’s Westville neighborhood. However, due to low business, Kari closed in 2005. Yu explained that the dishes seemed too new because not many Asian restaurants existed in the area. “I think people were not used to it,” she said. “Back then, when you say you came from Indonesia or Malaysia, people might not know.” interior remain stacked on tables — Basil “Maybe they do know Vietnam,” Yu added, remembering my last name, Nguyen. still attracts customers. “Because of the war,” I filled in her senYu is the niece of Claudia Tjia, who owns tence. We both giggled. the family-run business and is currently home in Indonesia, caring for her moth- The owners ultimately relocated to the er nearly 10,000 miles from New Haven. Shops at Yale area, creating a new name Yu has worked at the restaurant since its for their business: Basil. Tjia was living in opening in 2009, managing the restau- New Haven for more than 20 years, and rant for three years before moving to North she enjoys downtown New Haven. Carolina to get married. Yu and her husband Jay Jiang later returned to New Ha- “I think time helped people in the Unitven in 2016 to help Tjia with her business, ed States get better used to our food,” with Yu resuming her post as manager. The Yu explained. restaurant’s varied menu reflects the family’s heritage, which can be traced to China, After having cooked an order of pad thai, Indonesia and Malaysia. At Basil, one can Jiang emerged from the kitchen to join sample General Tso’s chicken and broccoli, our conversation. His family used to run a Indonesian stir-fried egg noodles or mie restaurant in Raleigh, North Carolina, and goreng, Malaysian curry and chicken satay he and Yu helped out. Customer demographics noticeably shifted upon moving skewers. from Raleigh to New Haven, Jiang said. Cultural artifacts embellish the restau- “There are lots of students here. [In Rarant. Blue-skinned wayang goleks, por- leigh, our customers were] mostly families traying Indonesia’s history of puppetry, and residents and more older people.” dangle by the red-glowing “OPEN” sign. Yu showed me a video of puppet masters Yu enjoys the restaurant’s proximity to Yale. controlling the ornate, wooden puppets. “I like seeing the students having fun,” she Yale Daily News | 27 Three angklungs — or bamboo tube in- said, as she walked toward the ringing telestruments — hang side by side, facing phone to pick up another order.

PROFILE Junzi, Ivy Wok and Yamasaki Teriyaki all provide locals with a variety of Asian dishes. “There’s community, I think, with the different Asian restaurants closeby,” said Yu. Learning from Kari, Basil staff added dishes to their menu so as to be more familiar with customers. “There’s not just Malaysian food like at Kari, but also Chinese, Thai, Japanese, Indonesian.”

Jiang emphasized the unifying power of their restaurant. “Customers are from different places; the Yale students are from around the world. But they all still come here to try our food.” Jiang is the assistant chef, while Tjia’s husband, Kai Chow, is the head chef. In addition to leading the kitchen team, Chow prepares the different sauces for all of the foods, from appetizers to entrees. Being the lead chef of Basil has provided Chow with the opportunity to continue pursuing his passion for cooking. “People told me that they love my food, so Claudia and I worked together to open Basil,” Chow said. Yu translated his words from Cantonese to English. “He has talent!” added Yu, nodding. Chow has been in the food industry for over 25 years. “[Tjia and Chow] both wanted to create a space where they could share their love for homestyle Asian food,” Yu said. The family aspired to expand people’s palettes and introduce Sino-Southeast Asian cuisine to the community. Yu’s most cherished menu items are spring rolls, stir-fried dumplings and General Tso’s chicken. Upon noticing my Snackpass order of beef drunken noodles and scallion pancakes, Yu approved my choices. “Everybody loves crunchy, sweet and spicy food!” she exclaimed. The Yale area, of course, is no stranger to Asian cuisine. Businesses like Basil,

There is a Chinese saying on which Basil’s name is based: jin bu huan, which has multiple meanings, according to Jiang. “Jin bu huan means ‘not to be exchanged even for gold’ or ‘valuable’ in Chinese,” added Yu, kindly pointing to a translation app on her phone. To the staff, basil and other herbs fit with this idea of jin bu huang. “Of course, we also use basil to make the food smell more good,” said Yu. “The restaurant name shows food makes people happy. There’s good luck.”

“The Yale students are from around the world. But they all still come here to try our food.”

Combating COVID-19 Like many other small businesses, Basil has been operating even during the pandemic. The business closed for four weeks in March 2020, when Yalies, who are Basil’s most frequent customers, were forced to complete the spring semester through Zoom. Following this brief hiatus, Basil reopened for takeout — the system still used today, 20 months later. Prior to COVID-19, Basil had eight employees. When the pandemic arrived, Basil had to cut three people due to the closing of dine-in services. “Lower business means we couldn’t have as many staff members,” Yu emphasized. “It was very challenging.” As an additional result of the pandemic, Basil changed their closing time from 11:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. This change was also in light of concerns about nighttime safety. “We do worry [about anti-Asian hate in the United States],” Yu commented. “Not knowing anything that would happen. I talked to my aunt and she said the same — very scary.”

PROFILE cent or 30 percent,” said Yu. This commission or marketplace fee has sparked debate in its restaurant partners, but the practice has persisted nonetheless.

Looking Forward Nearly two years after the start of the pandemic, as more activities return to in-person format, Basil staff are preparing to open for dining. Their staff numbers increased from five to seven, with both full-time and part-time employees. These worries are not unwarranted. Asian American businesses across the nation — including grocery stores, markets, bakeries and restaurants — have been victims of hate vandalism, from racist graffiti to arson attacks. According to new data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, anti-Asian hate crimes skyrocketed by 73 percent in 2020, which is “a disproportionate uptick compared to hate crimes in general, which rose 13 percent,” writes Sakshi Venkatraman.

Despite the manifold uncertainties, Yu remains buoyant. “Since the U.S. is a multiethnic country,” she said, “I believe that everything will be okay in the end.”

Going Mobile Yu attributes mobile ordering apps to having alleviated some of the stress related to maintaining a steady profit during COVID-19. Multiple orders can be taken at the same time, Yu told me, compared to phone or in-person orders — both of which can hinder efficiency. “For phone orders, I have to write it down, and it can be sometimes stressful when customers are all calling a lot,” said Yu. “Then I have to leave people on hold, and they might hang up the line because we’re not answering.” Although Basil took advantage of the apps prior to the pandemic, no substantial success accompanied this ordering system. Mobile ordering has bloomed out of the COVID-19 era, Yu said. “Snackpass, for example, helps us organize when we should have orders ready.” Food delivery has been a “silver lining” during COVID-19. Yu noted that in addition to Snackpass, Uber Eats and DoorDash have expanded Basil’s business — so much so that Basil staff decided not to hire a driver of their own. “Actually, we considered hiring a driver for Basil to deliver food, but we thought that was not needed,” she added. “Uber Eats is very efficient.” However, Uber Eats takes “a large percentage of the total order price — about 35 per-

“Fall 2020 compared to fall 2021, we’re doing a little better finances,” said Yu. She anticipates the restaurant will open for in-person dining at the beginning of 2022. The problem, however, might be searching for workers. “Hiring can be hard. We have to find people to work here” — she pointed to the dining area — “and there,” she said, gesturing to the kitchen. “I think some family members are returning, so that will be helpful to the kitchen team. The main thing is hiring and training the waiters.” Maintaining cleanliness after the pandemic is also crucial, said Yu. The variants of COVID-19 have raised concerns about reopening. Although the feeling of community has been absent due to the lack of staff-diner interaction, Yu is optimistic. “We miss a lot of people. But hopefully, we can get over this pandemic soon.”

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As Seen on TV: The Reality of Teen Drama Television

BY IDONE RHODES

n the summer after seventh grade, I watched all 91 hours of “Gossip Girl” in just three weeks. My 13-year-old self ate up the overblown, over-sexed drama; I even started online shopping for prom dresses so I would have options when prom finally rolled around five years later. (Ironically, I never had prom due to COVID-19, a situation TV did not prepare me for.) Despite knowing on some level that “Gossip Girl” was not intended to be a realistic representation of the adolescent experience, my disappointment only grew as I watched more teen television shows and my high school experience became increasingly different from the one these television shows promised me. Teen television almost always contains the same basic ingredients: upper or middle-class (sub)urban families, teenage characters who never do homework and lots and lots of sex. Depictions of high school on television focus on the social aspects — the parties, the dances, the dating and the gossip — and avoid the more mundane daily life of studying, doing extracurriculars and begging one’s parents for a ride because one lacks both a license and a car. As someone who watched teen television before even be-

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coming a teenager myself, these shows set me up for a rude awakening in high school. I thought I would spend every afternoon at the mall or at some cafe that was mysteriously the only restaurant in town. And I really thought that I might have a boyfriend the day I stepped onto campus my freshman year. Instead, life continued as usual, only the work was harder, and there was more of it. Of course, these shows don’t purport to be anything more than entertainment, but there is clearly a gap between the representation of adolescence “as seen on TV” and the reality of the teenage experience — especially as it relates to romance and sex. On the issue of dating in particular, some shows depict high stakes romantic situations in which issues of sex and virginity (Who has it? Who doesn’t?) are paramount. A 2010 article from “The Journal for Sex Research” assessed teen television programs that ran seasons from 2003-2004 and 2004-2005. Researchers found that out of 44 teenage characters, only two had undefined statuses of virginity and only one-third of the characters were not sexually active. Most of these characters were engaged in one way or another with sex or the discussion of sex.

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“The issue is not that teen shows are depicting adolescent sexual relationships; the problem arises when teen series stray into a grey area of portraying sex as the end all, be all of high school.”

The issue is not that teen shows are depicting adolescent sexual relationships; the problem arises when teen series stray into a grey area of portraying sex as the end all, be all of high school. In the first season of Friday Night Lights, an entire episode is devoted to whether two of the main characters, Julie Taylor and Matt Saracen, will have sex. Intense family drama ensues, and, long story short, they don’t end up sleeping together. In the third season, the topic is once again revisited. This time, the two have grown, matured and actually have sex. The morning after, Julie stares at herself dramatically in the mirror, and there is some suggestion that she has become a different person. Her journey from the first season to the third is complete; she has “grown up.” Once again, her parents don’t exactly see eye to eye with her, and there is another discussion about

their concerns with Julie’s being sexually active. This time, the conversation is much more two-sided, and Julie’s mother accepts that she has to let Julie take responsibility for her own choices. In many ways, this storyline does justice to the decision to have sex for the first time, but the extension of the narrative across multiple seasons and multiple family dramas somewhat narrows Julie’s story to the time before she has sex to the time after. The show plays into the virgin vs. non-virgin dichotomy which TV shows love to emphasize, even though the issue is much less relevant to everyday teenage life. The way “Friday Night Lights” handles sex also trickles into how dating is depicted. The show is rife with troubling examples of men treating women horribly and succeeding romantically for that behavior. One of the repeated subplots on the show is that “rally girls”

are assigned to each of the players on the football team. These girls basically offer themselves up to the players, and these teenage boys are given license to do whatever they want to the girls. The girls do the players’ homework, bake for them, and basically follow them around in an effort to fulfill their every desire. The show did express some self-awareness about the problematic nature of the situation. Still, seeing this behavior espoused on screen was, frankly, gross. The depiction also felt dishonest: Among my own friends in high school, there were frequent discussions about romantic relationships, but we led busy, three-dimensional lives in which dating was just one of many components. It’s hard to know if these shows are really driving teenagers towards behaviors they wouldn’t otherwise engage in. BJ Casey, a

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psychology professor at Yale who specializes in adolescence, explained that teenagers who are going to engage in “risky behaviors” were probably going to engage in those activities anyways, whether or not they had seen them represented on TV. “Teens are not stupid. They typically know what is real and what is fiction,” she said. “The extent to which television and these shows will impact them will depend on the extent to which they can really relate to the individuals.” Regardless of what teens may or may not do, these shows can create certain expectations for these experiences. In 2009, a study of American teenagers published in “Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health” wrote that “two-thirds of sexually experienced

teenagers in the United States say they wished they had waited longer to have intercourse for the first time.” They found that high percentages of teenagers regretted some aspect of their sexual initiation. Notably, more exposure to sex on television before having sex led to more regret after the fact for teenage boys. Jude Sack ’25 recalls the way he approached relationships during his early years of high school as a result of the “bad guy” trope often shown on teen TV. “Naturally, that becomes part of the culture,” he said. “The bad boys get the bad girls … When I’m younger, and I’m trying to figure out how to get girls, of course I’m going to have a phase where I’m an asshole.” Sack fell prey to what he described as “hypermasculinity,” especially in regards to

romantic relationships, perhaps in part due to the example set by television. As the expectations for television change with time and society demands a greater level of cultural awareness from the entertainment industry, it seems that the teen genre is grappling with how to represent adolescent sex and dating in a more authentic way. Out of this new awareness are born TV shows like “Sex Education.” The show depicts the good, the bad and the ugly of teen sex without shame. One of the most fascinating aspects of the show is the growth of the male protagonist, Otis. At the beginning of the show, Otis finds himself struggling with sexual repression and a fear of intimacy (due to walking in on his father cheating on his mother and the subsequent fallout

//SOPHIA DESCHIFFART 32 | December 2021

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of his parents’ marriage when he was younger). After developing a connection and sharing a kiss with the girl he likes, Ola, he ultimately works through his issues and is able to get involved in sexual and romantic relationships. Otis has many false starts and fumbles throughout the show. He is by no means absolved of the hypermasculine behaviors which often plague the teen TV show’s male protagonist and is sometimes dismissive and insensitive to the women he is romantically involved with. Still, in “Sex Education,” these behaviors are discussed, confronted, and overcome, as opposed to being promoted or ignored. In high school, I was by no means the most confident or popular. The teen-oriented shows I watched planted some seeds of insecurity, and I sometimes wondered what I could change about myself to make myself more romanceable (as I imagine most teenagers do). Sometimes, it seemed like people were seeking hookups or relationships to fulfill what we were all told were the requirements of being a teenager. Everyone was trying to become the most sexual, most desirable, most dateable version of themself. High school almost felt like a fraud. After being promised so much excitement (AKA so much sex), people took drastic measures to make that “movie magic” high school experience into reality, a goal which would turn out to be a truly sisyphean task. I feel lucky in that I don’t think the example set by these shows ever drove me to do things I didn’t really want to; however, whether or not you were “immune” to

these pressures, we were all, directly or indirectly, impacted by this confusion. At the end of the day, we don’t live out our teenage years on a stage in which our primary focus is to be beautiful and date our peers. We just have a lot more going on, and life isn’t that straightforward. Teen shows constantly peddle expectations that would make even the most secure teenager doubt themself occasionally. On

“Is there any accurate way to represent adolescence when teenagers themselves are so malleable, ephemeral and full of contradictions?” the issues of sex and dating, these shows can exacerbate worries that are already very much present in the teenage mind or create unachievable expectations. But even with the potential problems these shows present, they are also rife with visceral, intelligent, complex stories of adolescence. First loves, family hardships, bonds of friendship, and many, many mistakes are on the table in these TV shows. When these shows rise to the challenge, they can be true and beautiful. As professor Casey explains, “This is

a time when, if for nothing else, the adolescent brain is so sensitive to social and emotional cues and contexts that I think they’re incredibly drawn by this entertainment because they’re trying to understand everybody’s responses to everyone’s behavior.” In “Friday Night Lights,” for instance, the earnestness and richness of the show and its characters make it worth watching in spite of its flaws. In a journal entry from last year, I wrote: “Friday Night Lights hurts my heart when I watch it because the characters are so good, and they care so much. Sometimes it makes me cry.” The show allowed me to share in the triumphs and tragedies of characters who felt real to me. I didn’t always approve of their actions and the choices they made, but I wouldn’t say I always approve of the actions of people I know and cherish in real life either. The show made real for me the fact that being a teenager is often about making mistakes, and, in most cases, we all deserve understanding and forgiveness in our own processes of growing, maturing — or in other words, trying our very best to become ourselves. Is there any accurate way to represent adolescence when teenagers themselves are so malleable, ephemeral and full of contradictions? Maybe the issue isn’t accuracy at all, but rather honesty. If we seek and demand honesty in the teen television genre, there is a world of untapped potential to mine for the beauty that lies in the utter confusion of teenagehood.

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EIGHTEEN BY AUDREY KOLKER

thought it was a joke when Tyler told me he wanted to get married, so I laughed — a real loud, full belly cackle — and asked to whom, because deep down I was sort of an asshole. He was hanging upside down from the wooden railing of Jules’ back deck, stupidly cherubic curls grazing the grass beneath him and I wasn’t looking at him but I could tell he was glaring at me. Probably for the ‘whom’; he hated it when I talked like a jerk. Maybe his feelings were hurt. He always wanted to be taken seriously, even when he said shit like this. “Seriously, who?” Nobody in particular. But he was going to get married, he announced, because he had looked it up and he could. It was true. In Tennessee, you didn’t need a guardian’s permission once you turned 18, and he had already done everything else on the checklist. Jules and I went to the supermarket and cheered when he won three dollars on a 9’s in a Line lottery ticket. We rolled our eyes — actually, I rolled my eyes, Jules just laughed — when he spent his winnings on a pack of cigarettes and coughed up a lung in the parking lot by the shopping cart return. We held his hands while he received a lower back tattoo of Wile

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E. Coyote from a sketchy guy downtown, and we even waited outside the elementary school while he voted, talking about how weird it was to watch Tyler perform a civic duty. This was all that was left. “Okay,” I said, “Good luck.” I hoped that would be the end of it, except Jules came back out carrying assorted sliced fruits and a gigantic carton of Goldfish crackers, and he brought it up with her: “I’m gonna get married, isn’t that great?” She said: “Yikes.” She said: “That’s gonna be expensive.” She said: “And a real headache to annul.” And then she said, “Fucking entertaining though. Can I be your witness?” Delighted, Tyler started to pull himself back up the deck, beaming as he squirmed his way to a perch on the railing. He was such a terrible mixture of compelling and embarrassing that it hurt me to look in that direction. It was settled. He was getting married. My original point still stood: To whom? Tyler thought about this, his whole body swaying back and forth in the breeze of Jules’ backyard like a windchime. He was probably high, I realized, and Jules too. I felt like an idiot for figuring it out too late — and for

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being annoyed, even though I had told them I didn’t care what they did as long as it wasn’t in front of me. “It’s not about the person,” Tyler said. “It’s about the statement.” Jules hummed in agreement. “What statement?” I asked, resisting the urge to massage my temples or pinch the bridge of my nose or any of the other things old people did when they were stressed. “I’m eighteen, right?” said Tyler. “I never thought I’d make it that far.” Which was the sort of grandiose thing he would tell us that he didn’t mean, that was sort of concerning and sort of annoying at the same time. Tyler had never been sick, suicidal or in any way prone to danger. If he hadn’t thought he’d make it to eighteen it was because he hadn’t bothered to consider that there were moments beyond the one he was currently in. I tried to shoot Jules a look, but she was on her back in the long grass stuffing her mouth with Goldfish. I was going to have to check her for ticks afterward. “And we,” Tyler was saying, “need to celebrate life. Especially you, Mason.” I flushed a little; this was an old argument about me abandoning them for college that I wasn’t winning. Their post-graduation plans were never scholarly and constantly shifting. Last I’d asked, Jules assured me she had some social media sponsorship “locked down, basically,” and Tyler was wondering if he’d get free

Cherry Dips by working at the Dairy Queen. Tyler scooted off the railing and tipped gently onto the grass, and Jules crowed with glee and tried to shove a handful of Goldfish into his mouth, and he was saying no no no no no, both of them laughing so hard they shook. I stood to the side, sober and boring and wishing I wasn’t. I tried to distract myself by digging each seed out of my watermelon slice with the nail of my index finger. Then I said, “Whatever, I’ll marry you.” Just to insert myself back into their world, just to pretend I had ever in my life been uninhibited, had ever just said what I felt like saying, ignorant of any consequences. Tyler smiled sweetly, like he’d known all along I’d say yes, and he said, matter-of-fact: “Mason, you are my best friend in the entire motherfucking world.” Jules pitched a handful of Goldfish at his face in mock retribution. It sucked, because that was exactly what I wanted to hear. I stood in front of the only fulllength mirror in the secondhand store trying on a suit jacket that was too long in one arm and too short in the other while Tyler thumbed aimlessly at the tie selection hanging from the ceiling fan, taking occasional breaks to jokingly check out my ass in the purple corduroy pants he had made me try on. He had been like this ever since the proposal. It was funny, for him, to play with my hair or stare into my

eyes until I flushed and asked what was wrong with him, to really seem to be serious about this whole wedding thing. “Come help,” I said to Jules, who had no patience for men’s fashion. She was slumped in the gross armchair in the corner, a really impressive slouch, something that was going to give her a spine condition later in life. “Tyler is harassing me. And I honestly don’t think I can get this off of my body.” “There’s comfort in knowing what you’re going to be buried in,” she told me, not looking up from her lap. Ninety percent of the time Jules was no help at all. She was always on her phone, which she only owned for two reasons. The first was so she could edit memes where each star sign corresponded to an unflattering picture of Jake Gyllenhaal, posted on an incomprehensible Instagram account she’d been running since sophomore year; the second reason was so she could send paragraph-long texts of the passive aggressive variety to her long-distance girlfriend. The relationship was older than the Instagram account and far more arcane. When the girlfriend put her in a particularly bad mood, Tyler and I would pretend my dad had asked us to clean the shed and leave her to watch Lord of the Rings in my basement, go to the batting cages and miss every single shot or see if he could eat the entire bag of mini Babybel cheeses in under three minutes this time.

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I turned to him now. “In sickness and in health,” I said. “In good times and in bad. In please-get-over-here and in helpme-take-this-stupid-thing-off.” “These ties,” he replied, “are simply not ugly enough.” Jules announced from the corner that she had finished analyzing our star charts. She was a little worried about Tyler’s Pisces moon and my Scorpio rising, but it would probably all be fine. She sent us our corresponding Instagram posts. My Jake Gyllenhaal was eating an ice cream cone and Tyler’s was receiving a foot massage. They were really, really terrible. It was so hot we hung out in the air conditioned Kroger. Tyler, who was impervious to human sensations, felt fine, so he wandered around to find the cereal while Jules and I stuck our faces inside the freezers. “The ceremony has to be tasteful,” she said to me while I wondered how unhygienic it would be if I licked the ice crystals forming on the popsicle boxes. “Are you writing your own vows?” “No,” I said. She fixed me with a look, the same one she had been giving me since we were in kindergarten and I told her I couldn’t come to her Hot Wheels themed birthday party. “What’s that for?” “I’m only giving you my blessing if you write your own vows.” “What the fuck are you talking about?” I said. Jules rolled her eyes and took a grape popsicle out of one of the boxes. “Uh, are you going to pay for that?” “It’s not that hard,” she said. “Just be nice. And … heartfelt.” I didn’t want to talk about it anymore, so I went looking for Tyler and found him in Grains. Tyler liked to bounce around the aisle, touching his fingertips to the familiar boxes. “I’ve eaten this one,” he told me, “And this one, and this one too. It was fine. No Captain Crunch. But still good.” I tried not to watch him flutter or think about how I was leaving in a month in the same way I tried not to pick at my hangnails — I was doing it before I could stop myself, and I was somehow surprised when it hurt. “Why are we doing this?” I asked.

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//CECILIA LEE

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Tyler was engaged in a speculative thought exercise wherein he contemplated which box of Captain Crunch looked more like it might contain the special prize: a blue plastic toy parrot he would immediately throw out after he found it. Sometimes I tried to ask Tyler serious questions like this, when his conscious mind was occupied with sugar and his subconscious mind might be prone to answering. “I have a really good feeling about this box,” said Tyler. But the face I made in response must have been close to upset because he stopped being goofy for a second and a half — a giant effort, for him. “I like having you in my life, dude,” he said, facing away from me; he was pretending to be very interested in a box of Reese’s Puffs. Tyler’s voice was different when he wasn’t joking — it was quieter, and it cracked. Then he looked back and grinned. “Even though you’re kind of uptight, and sort of gangly.” “Thanks,” I said, half annoyed, half something else. “Are you writing your own vows?” He responded: “Do you think I could pull off fingerless gloves?” I thought about it for a second. “Honestly, yes.” Jules looked it up and found out that the license from the

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County Clerk was $97.50. I was already worried enough about student loans; I wasn’t going to pay for Tyler to ditch me at the altar when the joke wasn’t funny enough to him anymore. Tyler didn’t mind. He said, “I always knew I’d be a sugar daddy one day,” and he broke open his Lightning McQueen shaped piggy bank and came up with $27. “Shit,” he said. “And we have to pay for rings.” Tyler was better at wedding chicken than I was. “It’s not a big deal,” I said. “Cause we’re not going to need them.” “Yeah it is,” he frowned. “You’re my fiancé. I can’t have people saying I don’t treat you right.” He thought the ring pop was a cliché. Jules agreed. “I guess I owe you a wedding present,” she said, “so rings are on me.” She bought two bronzeish bands at the pawnshop that cost her four bucks each. I liked mine, even though it was probably going to give me gangrene. It would be nice to look at when I left — a reminder of the summer. Tyler wore the fingerless gloves to City Hall. They were neon purple mesh. I had a suit on, at least four sizes too large, that Jules promised made me look like David Byrne. So we were really going to do it, then. “I think this is progressive,”

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I told them both. “In terms of outdated standards surrounding platonic male affection.” “Come on,” said Jules. “Dude,” said Tyler. “Shut up.” He had written his own vows, as it turns out: I promise not to bring our marriage up in front of your parents unless it would be really funny. I promise to tell you all my thoughts about geckos before anyone else, except maybe Jules. I promise to stop judging you for the stupid fucking way you eat a watermelon. I had too. I promise I will not stop bitching about the fact that you don’t recycle. I promise to eat the gumball eyes you don’t like out of your Spongebob icees. I promise one day I will learn the difference between geckos and every other type of lizard. We fought over who got the marriage certificate for about half a minute before realizing that the only solution was to give it to Jules. She promised to frame it when she got home. “Where to next?” asked Tyler, admiring the ring on his finger. “I guess I’ll claim you on my taxes.” He looked horrified. “Do we have to do taxes now?” I was supposed to have started packing by now, but Jules said in honor of our one week anniver-

sary she’d drive us to the lake, and that sounded more fun. We fought over the music on the ride up, built sand-drip castles with dozens of towers, and competed to see who could get a leech stuck on their skin first (Tyler won). I made us reapply sunscreen every two hours. I started to bury Tyler in sand, which seemed like a good idea until I remembered how much of his body I had to touch to do it. He watched me the whole time, quieter than I had ever seen him, probably quieter than he had been since he learned how to talk. When only his head was sticking out, I said, “Did you know that us being married means I get a ton more financial aid now?” He smiled. “Nope.” “And I’m no longer required to live on campus next year. I could live with you. If you wanted.” “Wow,” he said, “That’s crazy, I had no idea.” He was so very pleased with himself. Jules had taken a candid of Tyler and I to send to the long-distance girlfriend, snapped right when Tyler broke free from the sand coffin. I didn’t look stressed at all in the picture, not about sunscreen or college or marriage or anything, and Tyler looked like he always did: like he was trying to make me laugh.

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BASIL By John Nguyen

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